Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Yoga

Automatic Asana list

I have just started learning yoga so looked at wikidata as the foundation for looking at the quality of all the entrys its all very confusing though, even looking at the photos of childs pose, some have arms forward and some have arms to the side.

the list is at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Talk:Q466797 if anyone more very i yoga would like to take a look, I don't want to make it more messy! Even if we could make sure each asana has a image that'd be a good first step Back ache (talk) 15:03, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the concern. There is no definitive list of asanas, for the good reason that, as you can see at Asana#Origins of the asanas, more are constantly being created (at an accelerating rate). The names of the asanas are passed around and applied to different poses (sometimes radically different), and schools of yoga differ in what they consider the standard form of even the simpler and older poses. Thus, Balasana (Child Pose) has knees together, hands back in Iyengar Yoga, but in the various flow styles the hands are stretched out forwards and the knees are often but not necessarily apart. Standardisation is therefore a worthy but unattainable goal. The plan for the articles has been to cover the major poses, grouping any similar poses with them and describing them briefly. Getting good images for each asana article is plainly desirable, and we've just about attained that; getting images for every variation named in every article is a far larger task, and given that the number of asanas and variants (and who's to say which is which...) is rising, unlikely to be completed any time soon. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:07, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

yes it does seem a monumental task and though a gentle past-time it doesn't escape "debate" within its ranks :-)

For the various styles one way forward would be to identify the keystone text on the subject like Iyengar's Light on Yoga

and build out from there Back ache (talk) 15:41, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

That text has already been used extensively across the WikiProject. It isn't always consistent, actually; and it doesn't cover any asana introduced in the past half-century. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:48, 30 January 2026 (UTC)